Let My Athletes Go! (VIDEO)

Let my Athletics go, that is, to Las Vegas.

The title above plays with Moses and the Book of Exodus 5:1.

Folks were shocked with the attendance for Tuesday's home game against Baltimore. Just 3,748 fans, and that's after an opening day with 17,503 (which ain't that hot either, if you ask me).

I'm watching Friday night baseball on Apple TV right now. Texas at Oakland. It's not very crowded, to put it mildly (though whatever fans are there are fired up and enthusiastic). 

Turns out this is all by design. *Hmm.*

At USA Today, "The Oakland A's (and MLB) discouraged fans from coming to the Coliseum. The people listened":

For the Oakland Athletics, it's all going according to plan.

Observe the arena of sports long enough, and you eventually memorize the playbook. And for franchises aiming to hijack taxpayers for a new arena or hold fans hostage lest they lose their team to a thirstier city, Tuesday night's barren abomination of A's-Orioles at what's now called the RingCentral Coliseum was merely the next page in a well-concocted script.

The attendance – "announced" attendance, at that – was just 3,748, the lowest crowd count at the alternately dreary and cheery Coliseum since 1980. It's also the smallest crowd at a major league game minus pandemic restrictions since an announced 5,297 fans attended an August 2019 Miami Marlins game.

The reasons why are both well-worn and also infuriating.

The A's search for a new stadium is nearing its third decade and so well-documented, you could count more artists' renderings of potential homes than significant free agents the A's retained.

The Coliseum itself – opened in 1966, home to the A's since 1968 and roughly a top 10 major league park when it was a baseball-only facility in a sea of multi-purpose behemoths in the 1980s and early '90s – has been allowed to fall into disrepair, its charm and sunny vistas dwarfed by a renovation inspired by the Raiders' 1995 return to the city.

Yeah, the A's could use a new park. But beyond the "lols" at sewage backups and playoff collapses and payroll-cutting trades, it's what's happened since the club has had the city to itself that's most maddening.

The Raiders, as they do, held the city hostage in the '90s and then bailed for Las Vegas, anyway. The Warriors built a dynasty and then hopped the bridge back to San Francisco for a haute couture arena and revenues more in line with their Silicon Valley-esque rise.

That left Oakland – The Town, as it was lovingly known by natives before getting beaten into the ground by appropriaters – all to the A's. And every move that's happened since the Raiders' 2020 kickoff in Las Vegas has smacked of fan alienation.

Let's start with the heel turn of A's president Dave Kaval, who presented himself as the fan-friendly, public-facing voice of a bright new era of Oakland baseball. He littered his social media feeds with "boom" and "100" emojis, celebrating unlikely wins, directly answering fans' queries as if he could solve anything and introducing aesthetically-pleasing and incentive-laced entry points such as food trucks, a "Treehouse" in-game hangout and an A's Access plan that in its first year doubled the season ticket base and very much looked like the future of sports attendance.

Silly us, we thought it was for the purpose of pleasing the clientele. Instead, these clearly were trial balloons aimed at workshopping ideas for a new stadium.

Since the Raiders left and the pandemic landed, the A's have held all the cards and their actions suggest as much.

A's Access was discontinued. Parking was jacked up to $30, even as COVID-19 restrictions left mass-transit options emaciated. Single-game tickets were raised – $25 for a third-deck seat in a decrepit football stadium, anyone? – and in the grimmest turn yet, many season-ticket packages were significantly raised before this season.

How much? A bleacher seat went from $456 in 2019 to $840 in 2022, according to the San Jose Mercury News, with more expensive options also doubling or nearly doubling.

Meanwhile, as the A's continued jumping through ever-growing hoops for their desired waterfront home at Howard Terminal, Kaval and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred teamed up on a not-so-subtle bit of dark messaging: Your current home sucks.

When Oakland, fooled more than once by franchise owners, did not rubber stamp a half-billion dollars in infrastructure and carve out multiple tax districts to enrich the A's, it was game on. Las Vegas was raised as a relocation option, with Kaval tweeting from a Golden Knights playoff game in case you're not into the whole subtlety thing.

Manfred openly pushed Vegas as a "parallel track" to Howard Terminal, stamping the league endorsement on a plan that it was the only appropriate option for the A's, and sending a loud message to those who might have enjoyed the East Oakland sunshine and dream of a newer ballpark there.

"The Oakland Coliseum site is not a viable option for the future vision of baseball," MLB said in its initial public show to play the bad guy in this drama. "We have instructed the Athletics to begin to explore other markets while they continue to pursue a waterfront ballpark in Oakland. The Athletics need a new ballpark to remain competitive, so it is now in our best interest to also consider other markets."

Of course, viability is in the eye of the ticket-holder.

Do you want a modern, 35,000-seat venue with good weather, access and even a few adjacent amusements? That would check off most fans' wish lists, and the Coliseum site, with a billion or two dollars of TLC, could provide that.

Or do you want a real estate development masquerading as a ballpark, with a price tag of $12 billion further enriching the owner and allowing him to keep up with the Atlantas and San Franciscos and Chicagos of the world, with non-baseball revenue lining his pockets regardless of team performance?

Howard Terminal, and Howard Terminal only, could provide that.

Fans in Oakland were always sophisticated, and many hardy souls still showed up anyway. Now, perhaps, the final indignities have been delivered...

 

Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard: Defamation Trial (VIDEO)

I watched this and it's pathetically depressing. 

First, these two shouldn't have been under the same roof. With all of his and her resources, why not live apart and figure out what to do with the marriage. I don't read the tabloid magazines so I have no idea, but it's completely disheartening. 

Second, it's very sad that all of this is out in the open, on public display. You can hear them fighting at the audio, both yelling (and she screaming), and you know this isn't their best moments as humans. That is, the negative spotlight stays a while. Depp looks old and tired. Heard looks shamed and on the verge of tears. 

And these are beautiful people. Johnny Depp is by far one of the most talented actors of his (or my) generation. He's amazing and I love him, but not like this. I'm not familiar with Ms. Heard's work, but I followed her on Twitter some time back, for some reason, and she posts frequently (or at least she was before the trial) and looks full of life and love. 

All of this is a travesty. 

Scroll forward at the video a bit and you'll hear the tape-recorded fight scenes. Neither party comes out well, and, actually, Ms. Heard comes off the worse.

Yesterday, at the New York Times, "Johnny Depp, Accused of Spousal Abuse, Says Ex-Wife Was the Aggressor":

The actor testified in a defamation case that he filed against his ex-wife, Amber Heard, who has said he often struck her during their relationship.

The actor Johnny Depp took the stand for the second day on Wednesday to describe his turbulent marriage to the actress Amber Heard, whom he has sued for defamation, accusing her of “demeaning name-calling” that often escalated into physical violence.

“It could begin with a slap, it could begin with a shove, it could begin with throwing a TV remote at my head, throwing a glass of wine in my face,” Mr. Depp told a jury at Fairfax County Circuit Court in Virginia.

Ms. Heard has accused Mr. Depp in court papers of repeatedly assaulting her throughout their relationship, from slapping and kicking to dragging her across the floor by her hair and grasping her throat, making her fearful that he would kill her.

But over the past few years of legal wrangling in the United States and Britain, Mr. Depp has maintained that Ms. Heard was the one who was violent toward him. In testimony on Tuesday, Mr. Depp denied ever striking Ms. Heard or any woman.

Ms. Heard denied in court papers that she had ever struck Mr. Depp except in self-defense or in defense of her sister.

Mr. Depp has sued Ms. Heard for defamation over an op-ed she wrote in 2018 in which she said she was a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” The article did not mention Mr. Depp’s name, but he testified that the time-frame reference in the op-ed was clearly in reference to their marriage, which lasted less than two years.

The seven-person jury will also consider Ms. Heard’s countersuit, which asserts that Mr. Depp defamed her when his former lawyer made statements saying that her allegations of domestic abuse were a hoax.

During more than five hours of testimony on Wednesday, the jury heard snippets of recorded arguments between the couple. Those included audio of Mr. Depp confronting Ms. Heard about kicking a door into his head the previous night and Ms. Heard asking, “Why are you obsessing over the fact that I can’t remember it the way you remember it?”

During his testimony, Mr. Depp strove to present his side of several incidents that have surfaced as their problems in their relationship became public, including the time Mr. Depp’s middle finger was severed. The injury occurred in 2015 while the couple was in Australia for the filming of the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.

Mr. Depp told the jury that, at the time, Ms. Heard was angry about a meeting she had with a lawyer about a potential postnuptial agreement and threw two vodka bottles at him, one of which missed while another shattered into his hand, causing his finger to bleed “like Vesuvius.” He testified that he then experienced a “nervous breakdown” and used his bloody finger to write on the walls messages that “represented lies that she told me.”

Ms. Heard, who is expected to take the stand later in the trial, has given a very different account of the incident in Australia, writing in court papers that Mr. Depp became violent with her during an argument about his drug use. She has said that at one point he grabbed her by the neck and collarbone and slammed her into a countertop, then hit her with the back of his hand and slammed a phone against a wall until it “smashed into smithereens,” injuring his finger.

Upon her return to Los Angeles, Ms. Heard wrote in court papers that “I had a busted lip, a swollen nose and cuts all over my body.”

In 2016, Ms. Heard was granted a temporary restraining order against Mr. Depp after telling a court in California that Mr. Depp had thrown a phone at her face at close range, bruising it. (Mr. Depp testified that he “flopped” the phone onto the couch and has asserted in court papers that Ms. Heard’s facial marks were of her own doing.)

Many of the accusations being lobbed back and forth in Virginia have already been aired in a court in London. After Mr. Depp sued The Sun newspaper there for a headline in which they referred to him as a “wife beater,” citing “overwhelming evidence” during their marriage, a British judge ruled against the actor...

 

'He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone...'

Oh boy.

Madison Cawthorne's been found out. Hmm. Now we can understand his attacks alleging member of the GOP conference attending drug-fueled orgies. Projection much? 

At Politico, "Exclusive: Madison Cawthorn photos reveal him wearing women’s lingerie in public setting: The embattled congressman has outraged Republican colleagues with accusations of orgies and drug use."

Click through for the photos. 

The title quotation's from the Book of John 8:7.

Katie Pavlich

Ms. Katie ahead of "The Five" today, on Twitter.

Netflix, Facing Reality Check, Vows to Curb Its Profligate Ways

It's funny, because I just haven't been watching *anything* on Netflix of late. I like news, movies, sports. It's got to be a very good streaming series for me to invest the time to binge watch or view over multiple seasons. 

I actually watched the first season of "Euphoria," but that was on HBO. I'm too busy with school right now in any case. Summertime is when I have the time to watch a lot of television (though I did see "Passion of the Christ" on Netflix before Holy Week just past). 

I'm not canceling my subscription just yet, but honestly, I use Amazon Prime more frequently these days. 

Oh well.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Streaming service spent lavishly on productions to win subscribers, but now growth has slowed":

For Netflix Inc., the era of carefree spending is over.

The streaming giant ran up a huge bill over the past several years as it expanded across the globe and produced a mountain of programming, prioritizing growth over cost efficiency. Now the company is imposing more financial discipline, according to senior executives.

The shift comes as competition from an array of streaming rivals begins to take a toll, a new reality that was evident in first-quarter results announced Tuesday. The company lost subscribers for the first time in over a decade, and revenue grew at its slowest pace in years. Shares plunged 35%, the stock’s second-worst one-day decline ever, erasing $54 billion in market value.

“Well, it’s a bitch,” Netflix Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Reed Hastings said of the results while addressing employees in a town hall on Wednesday afternoon, according to people familiar with his remarks.

After churning out over 500 original programs last year, Netflix is looking to add fewer new titles, with a greater emphasis on quality, people familiar with the company’s strategy said. It is revamping production deals to limit its risk, and prioritizing programs with the biggest return, not the greatest reach, the people said. A key internal metric: the ratio of a program’s viewership to its budget.

“We should right-size budgets depending on what the creative dictates, and what the size of the audience is,” Bela Bajaria, the head of global TV for Netflix, said in a recent interview.

She said when Netflix first started making original programs it had no track record and had to make outsize bids to land “House of Cards” and other high-profile shows. “That was the cost of entry, the cost of doing business,” Ms. Bajaria said.

Netflix executives said the company expects to continue to grow spending on content to more than $20 billion this year while scrutinizing it more closely. Ms. Bajaria said that doesn’t mean the service will go cheap on production. “We’re always going to make great shows and have the amount of money needed for the creator’s vision,” she said.

As it looks to rein in costs, Netflix is also exploring new ways to boost revenue. In January, the company said it was raising prices in the U.S. and Canada. On Tuesday’s earnings call, Mr. Hastings said Netflix is exploring adding a lower-priced, ad-supported version of the service to court cost-conscious viewers. And, after blaming password-sharing for limiting its growth, Netflix says it is looking to “monetize” the practice.

The newfound focus on content costs is causing tensions with Hollywood’s producers and show runners, who have benefited from the streamer’s largess. Netflix’s tendency to give shows a quick hook when it believes they aren’t delivering a return is another sore spot with producers and creators. Some producers say Netflix needs to be more aware of its competitive environment, and factor in the programming rivals are launching when deciding when to release its own shows.

“If there is anything I would say is a fault of Netflix, it is that they are so insular. They may not see what’s going on outside their walls or they know and the hubris is so great they don’t care,” said Jeff Fierson, whose credits for Netflix include the movie “Sweet Girl” and the short-lived series “Daybreak.”

Mr. Fierson noted that “Daybreak”—a show about teens in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles—made its debut close to the premiere of Disney+’s “The Mandalorian” and the debut of the Apple TV+ streaming service.

Warning sign Netflix still leads the pack in streaming video with more than 220 million subscribers. But its recent turbulence has rattled Wall Street, causing investors to question how big the pot of gold is in the streaming wars. Shares in Paramount Global, which operates the Paramount+ streaming service, fell 7% on Wednesday, while shares in Walt Disney Co., owner of Disney+, fell 5% and shares in Warner Bros. Discovery, owner of HBO Max, fell 5%.

Disney+, Netflix’s closest rival with 130 million subscribers globally, is starting to feel some pressure as well. The company launched a low-cost, ad-supported tier to boost subscribers. It is broadening beyond the “Star Wars” and “Marvel” programming that has anchored Disney+, hoping to reach new audiences and be better positioned to achieve its target of between 230 million and 260 million subscribers by the fall of 2024. The ABC show “Dancing with the Stars,” which appeals primarily to an older audience, will move exclusively to Disney+ starting this fall.

All streaming players are learning that adding new subscribers is getting much harder, especially in the mature U.S. market. Every service is under pressure to create a steady flow of new shows and movies to draw in new subscribers and retain existing ones. The hope is that every once in a while they’ll score a big hit like Netflix did with “Squid Game,” “Tiger King” and “Queen’s Gambit.”

Veteran media analyst Michael Nathanson, who has raised concerns about the prospects for major players in streaming, said consolidation that reduces the number of competitors might relieve some pressure, but “for the time being, this is a pretty capital-intensive business.”

Some producers and writers say they are frustrated by inconsistent guidance from streaming services, which are always looking for a new formula to attract more subscribers. “As creative people we are getting whipsawed. There is not a mission statement that sticks around for more than a couple of months,” said producer Mike Royce, whose credits include the Netflix reboot of “One Day at a Time.”

When Netflix first introduced original programming to its platform a decade ago, its pitch to creators was that there would be little interference from the “suits” and no worries about ratings. In recent years the company has spent hundreds of millions of dollars signing superstar producers including Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Murphy, setting off a talent arms race among Hollywood studios.

Now, the service has a never-ending conveyor belt of new content. Shows have a window of several weeks to find their audience or they are canceled, meaning they usually aren’t promoted on the home page and become harder for viewers to find. Netflix executives say the company’s cancellation rate is on par with that of rival streamers, and of broadcast and cable networks...

 

How the Gay Rights Showdown Threatens Disney's Unprecedented Self-Rule in Florida

One of the big culture war stories of the moment. 

Governor DeSantis is a fighter.

At the Los Angeles Times, "The speed at which the legislature has acted against Disney reflects the growing tension between the company’s outwardly progressive stance on social issues and Florida’s conservatives":

For more than half a century, Walt Disney World has effectively operated as it own municipal government in central Florida.

A 1967 state law established the Reedy Creek Improvement District, giving Walt Disney Co. extraordinary powers in an area encompassing 25,000 acres near Orlando where the sprawling themed resort now sits. The law grants Disney a wide range of abilities, including the power to issue bonds and provide its own utilities and emergency services, such as fire protection.

The law is partly what convinced Disney to come to Florida in the first place and allowed it to flourish and become the state’s largest private employer, with nearly 80,000 jobs.

Now, though, that special designation is under serious threat as Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican legislators wage an escalating culture war against Disney over the Burbank-based entertainment giant’s opposition to legislation that it considers to be anti-gay.

The Florida House of Representatives on Thursday approved a bill that would dissolve Walt Disney World’s private government. The action came a day after the Florida Senate passed the bill that would dissolve all independent special districts established before 1968, including Reedy Creek. State senators voted 23 to 16 in favor of the bill during a special session of the state Legislature.

“Disney is a guest in Florida,” Republican Rep. Randy Fine, who sponsored the bill, tweeted on Tuesday before the vote. “Today, we remind them.”

DeSantis, who had previously backed legislative efforts to revoke Disney’s special privileges, on Tuesday expanded the special session to consider the elimination of the district. The bombshell announcement dropped just hours before the special session that was originally intended to focus on congressional redistricting, which has also been controversial. The lawmakers also approved DeSantis’ redistricting map that favors Republicans.

DeSantis and conservative commentators have spent weeks blasting Disney for its opposition to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which the governor signed last month. Disney has said its “goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts.” The company also pledged to “pause” all political donations in the state as it reevaluates its approach to advocacy.

Disney’s Chief Executive Bob Chapek first voiced opposition to the bill, nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay” by its opponents, after receiving blowback from employees. Chapek, who initially resisted getting involved to avoid Disney becoming a political football, spoke out only after the bill passed the state Legislature.

The Parental Rights law bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through Grade 3 “or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” LGBTQ activists say the law amounts to a homophobic attack on queer youth.

The speed at which the legislature has acted against Disney reflects the growing tension between the company’s outwardly progressive stance on social issues and Florida’s conservatives, particularly DeSantis, who many observers believe will mount a presidential run in 2024.

Some observers had seen the rhetoric as mere grandstanding. But proving a point against Disney may matter more now to DeSantis’ base than the traditional business-friendly aims of economic conservatives, analysts told The Times.

“I thought that this was an effort to shoot across the bow and cause Disney to steer in a slightly different direction, and that wiser minds would prevail,” said Richard Foglesong, author of “Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando.” “That could still happen. But what’s really behind this is the culture war. Things have changed. This is not the Republican Party of the Bushes.”

But aspects of how the dissolution of the Reedy Creek Improvement District would work are still unclear...

Disney's making a big mistake, and they'll lose, badly.

 

Glenn Loury, Brown University Professor of Economics, Was Addicted to Crack in the 1980s (VIDEO)

This is something else, at Loury's Substack, "The Only Professor in the Halfway House, With Jordan Peterson":

A few months back, the one and only Jordan B. Peterson invited me onto his podcast, and I’m happy to say the episode has just been released. Our discussion ranges from climate change to divorce rates to the Pareto principle. Jordan is a clinical psychologist, so we spend a lot of time with our social scientist hats on.

We also get into some more personal material. Jordan’s early research into addiction leads him to ask about the place of spirituality in my own experience with addiction and recovery. As you may know, in the 1980s, I became addicted to crack cocaine. I had a terrible habit, and it could easily have cost me my career, my family, and my life. I had the support of friends, treatment, and my late wife Linda to help me through, but I also found a kind of spiritual support from two different sources: Christianity and Alcoholics Anonymous...

And watch:

The New Class Chasm in the Culture Wars

A really amazing bit of reporting here, from Batya Ungar-Sargon, at RealClearPolitics:

Judging by Twitter, cable news, or our politicians, LGBTQ identity is once again at the front of the culture wars in America, which is ironic given how little debate there is among everyday Americans. A closer look at how this issue is being weaponized reveals something interesting about our current moment.

When it comes to transgender debates, leftist journalists, politicians, and activists have positioned themselves as the defenders of LGBTQ rights against a bigoted anti-gay Republican Party. But in overlaying the transgender issue with gay rights writ large, progressive activists are conflating two issues, one of which is no longer controversial. It’s a category error that allows them to posture as warriors in a war that has already been won, while what they are actually doing is waging a new war that has little purchase even on their own side.

The latest example of this is a much-discussed Washington Post article published Tuesday which doxxed the woman behind an anonymous Twitter account, @libsoftiktok. She reposts videos from TikTok of educators bragging about teaching toddlers to masturbate, or teaching 6-year-olds that doctors sometimes misgender babies, or arguing that 3-year-olds are old enough to learn about gender identity, or having a Q&A with students about coming out trans. The videos amplified by the account have made their way onto conservative media and from there into conservative legislation, which was the impetus behind the Washington Post hit piece.

“Libs of TikTok has become a powerful force online, shaping right-wing media, impacting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and influencing millions by posting viral videos aimed at inciting outrage,” the article’s author, journalist Taylor Lorenz, tweeted.

Putting aside the shoddy ethics of doxxing a private citizen for curating already public content, the Washington Post story rather disingenuously whitewashed the actual content of the videos that @libsoftiktok posts. For example, instead of stating what was in a video featuring a woman explaining how she teaches toddlers to touch their private parts, the article only notes that @libsoftiktok called the woman in it a “predator” and that the video went on to be featured on Fox News.

There’s a tell in that obfuscation: The Washington Post probably doesn’t want to defend the “sexy summer camp” counselor teaching toddlers to masturbate, a view that few trans people would defend, so instead it resorts to calling anyone who opposes such education anti-gay. The article characterizes @libsoftiktok as “a steady stream of TikTok videos and social media posts, primarily from LGBTQ+ people, often including incendiary framing designed to generate outrage.” Instead of telling you what’s in the videos, it tells you what @libsoftiktok says about them.

It's a cunning move, one that allows progressives like Lorenz and her readers to portray opponents of strangers teaching 3-year-olds about sexual identity as moral perverts. This brilliant subterfuge leaves the reader with the feeling that she has gotten to know a dastardly person tweeting into the ether, without ever letting on that the captions are about actual content that is often disturbing even to people on the left (hence why they won’t defend the videos).

Lorenz accuses @libsoftiktok of participating in the “groomer” discourse without ever once describing any of the videos that led the account to do so – videos even the most ardent defender of LGBT rights would be hard pressed to defend.

Interestingly, none of the people defending the doxxing of a private citizen have argued that anything @libsoftiktok has posted hasn’t been real or true. They have instead acted like the content is true – and thus must be stopped. “Libs of TikTok is basically acting as a wire service for the broader right-wing media ecosystem,” Ari Drennen, LGBTQ program director for Media Matters, told Lorenz.

In other words, the problem isn’t that the information isn’t true, but that the truth is getting out there...

Keep reading.

 

Warner Bros Discovery to Shut Down CNN+ Month After Launch (VIDEO)

A big story, and a bit shocking, considering the intense fanfare surround the cable network's streaming service. My first response was "wow!," and I'm not the only one. 

At Variety, "CNN+ Is Shutting Down One Month After Launch (EXCLUSIVE)."

Folks on Twitter mentioned that Variety scooped CNN's own story. *Laugh out loud here.*

More at Twitchy, "Say it ain’t so! Warner Bros. Discovery has reportedly decided to shut down CNN+ (without informing Brian Stelter, apparently); UPDATED," and "Incoming CNN CEO’s memo to employees should totally help soften the blow from CNN+’s humiliating demise."

And video at the New York Post, "CNN+ is shutting down less than a month after ill-fated launch."

Matthew Continetti, The Right

At Amazon, Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.

Annie Agar in Yellow

This woman grows on you.

Also, from U.C. Irvine.

And Elizabeth Hurley.

Jamie Thompson, Standoff

At Amazon, Jamie Thompson, Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation.

Americans Are Over the Pandemic, Despite the ("Coming") Omicron 2 Wave

I'm over it, but I went to the Book Barn the other day, and the store heavily "recommended" masks and all staff members were masked-up to the hilt. I felt like it was April 2020.

And mind you, this included young people, including a woman at the sales counter who looked like a college student (and thus at extremely low risk of infection).

One good thing I'm noticing is fewer and fewer workers at restaurants --- especially hosts and servers --- are wearing masks. I think things are getting back to normal, and if Democrat states continue mask mandates --- or reimpose them over the summer, when the new "wave" is supposedly expected --- they'll be toying with political death.

At the Wall Street Journal, "BA.2 Proves the Pandemic Isn’t Over, but People Are Over It":

Two years of dealing with Covid-19 have made people tired of taking precautions, getting tested and asking about other people’s status.

BA.2 is spreading in the U.S., although few want to talk about it.

The Omicron subvariant is contributing to school and work absences, yet two years of dealing with Covid-19 have made people tired of taking precautions, getting tested and asking about other people’s status, say physicians, psychologists and behavioral scientists.

If this is a pandemic wave, then many have decided the best response is a weary shrug.

Part of that reaction comes from the fact that while cases are ticking up in some areas, hospitalizations remain low. Research has so far shown most people who are up-to-date with Covid-19 vaccines face little risk of landing in the hospital with BA.2, and prior infection with another variant also bolsters the body’s defenses.

In addition, people in many places got on with their lives long ago and are unwilling to return to a pandemic crouch.

Psychologists say it can be difficult to discern how seriously to take BA.2, given shifting guidance and sometimes difficult-to-parse public-health messaging. That anxiety and uncertainty can result in avoidance, says Dr. Bethany Teachman, a psychologist and director of clinical training at the University of Virginia. Avoidance takes various forms, she says, including refraining from asking friends about Covid exposures to avoid answers people may not want to hear.

Some people say they won’t worry about BA.2 unless it is absolutely clear they need to. Nearly three-quarters of Americans polled by Monmouth University in mid-March agreed that Covid is here to stay, and people should get on with their lives.

Kristin Green, 55 years old, a high-school English teacher in Orange County, N.Y., says when she heard about the BA.2 variant, it felt like the wind was sucked out of her.

“It was like, oh, not again. Come on. We’re finally out together, seeing each other, and I don’t want to have to go back to that,” says Ms. Green. She hopes not to have to don her mask during the school day again.

“If they require it at work, obviously, I will,” she says. “Otherwise, no.”

Some patients are opting out of testing to avoid the financial and social implications of testing positive and missing work or long-awaited travel and events, says Shantanu Nundy, a primary-care physician and chief medical officer at digital healthcare firm Accolade. And some patients who do test positive for Covid-19 don’t want to keep testing until they get a negative result.

“I got a lot of those phone calls when people say, ‘Hey, I’m having a weird cough. It’s probably allergies, right?’ or ‘I’m positive, but it’s been four days and I really don’t have any symptoms. Like I’m sure I’m fine to go on XYZ trip,” he says.

Figures from the Department of Health and Human Services show testing peaked at 7.74 tests per 1,000 people on Jan. 9 and has since declined to 1.91 tests per 1,000 people, according to an analysis from researchers at the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data. These data only account for PCR tests, said researchers, which are lab-reported and easier to track than at-home rapid tests, which have boomed in popularity.

The shift to home testing along with shutdowns in testing sites have made public-health experts concerned that official case tallies are a significant undercount. Natasha Bhuyan, a family physician at One Medical in Phoenix, says some of her patients are unaware how prevalent the virus remains and are surprised when they test positive.

“They come in and they’re like, ‘I think my allergies are acting up, or I have a headache, I’m dehydrated, or I probably have a stomach bug,’ and when I suggest getting a Covid test, people are like, ‘Oh, I don’t think I have Covid,’” says Dr. Bhuyan.

People who do test positive are often confused about whom they should tell and what they should do, as contact-tracing efforts have faded and mandatory precautions have dropped.

When Zach Ruh, 26, a treasury analyst for a tech company in New York City, woke up more fatigued than usual late last month, he chalked it up to jet lag from a recent skiing trip to New Mexico. He happened to pass a pop-up testing site on a grocery-shopping excursion several days later and decided to take a PCR just in case, he says. Two days later, he received a surprising text: He had tested positive...

 

A Student's Perspective on Book Banning

From By Sungjoo Yoon, "I’m a High School Junior. Let’s Talk About ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Mockingbird":

BURBANK, Calif. — In late 2020, when the Burbank Unified School District removed five classic novels from mandatory reading lists in my city’s classrooms, I started a petition to protest the decision. The petition, which is still open, has more than 5,000 signatures.

I was a sophomore at Burbank High School at the time, and had read four of the five books in school — “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain; “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” by Mildred D. Taylor; “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee; and “The Cay” by Theodore Taylor. The fifth, “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck, I read on my own a few years earlier.

The books were being removed from the core curriculum, according to Matt Hill, the superintendent of the Burbank Unified district, after complaints from students and parents that the depictions of racism and language in these works — particularly the use of the N-word — caused harm to Black students.

My position was this: I acknowledged that Black students were being marginalized in our classrooms (I was sympathetic, too; I am all too familiar with the demeaning nature of racism) — but did not think that it was the fault of these books or their content. I believed, and still believe, that the solution was not to remove the books, but to add more books written by people of color, and to better train teachers to teach these books sensitively to students.

As the petition attracted signatures, I spoke at several school board meetings on the issue. I recall one meeting in particular. I had prepared to talk about how these novels helped shape me both as a student and as a human being. I spoke briefly about how reading the story of a Black family in the Deep South in “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” under the guidance of a caring teacher, had moved me to tears and to a commitment to learn more about the resilience and resistance of the people upon whose backs this country was built. I explained how these class experiences helped move me and some fellow students from complacent private citizens to people who today are deeply involved in the fight for social justice.

There was more I could have said: How Atticus Finch’s defense of Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird” taught me the danger of complacency; how the unlikely friendships of Huckleberry Finn and Jim in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or Phillip Enright and Timothy in “The Cay” taught me that love transcends any and all differences.

But standing on the boardroom floor as comments from others in the meeting began, I witnessed the public forum — made up mostly of parents, administrators and educators — devolve into tribalist dissension. The meeting quickly became a two-sided shouting match pitting supposed “freedoms” against purported “justice.” There was plenty of arguing, but little or no meaningful discussion on why those novels were in question, or what students would lose or gain by a ban against them.

At that moment, I had a long-overdue realization: How we as Americans approach restrictions on literature curriculums is not only flawed but also wholly reactionary. My experience at that meeting and others convinced me that the problem is not that we disagree, but how. We need to shift focus away from reflexive outrage about restrictions and bans, and toward actual discussions of the merits and drawbacks of the individual books...

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The Bible Is Constroversial

Of course it is, but I don't normally think about it.

But Alley Beth Stuckey, our Twitter theologian, has thoughts:

Surprised Christians are confused by this. Yes, the resurrection is offensive to the world, just like the cross is folly to the world (1 Cor 1:18). The gospel, which rests on the resurrection of Christ, is offensive. If Google is offended by it, that’s because they should be.

— Allie Beth Stuckey (@conservmillen) April 17, 2022

Russia's Easter Offensive

From, Timothy Snyder, on Substack, "Jesus in east European political thought":

Today Easter is celebrated by western Christians; a week from now it will be celebrated by the Orthodox and Greek Catholics in Ukraine, and by the Orthodox in Russia. By then, Russian troops will be engaged in their Easter Offensive, a new Russian attack on Ukraine in the Donbas.

The coincidence of the most important holiday in the Christian tradition with a war of atrocity gives an occasion to think about what Easter means, and how the life and death of Jesus has been interpreted.

One way of thinking about the life and death of Jesus is to connect them. Jesus of Nazareth took risks in life. He had things he needed to say about love and truth, but he did not deliberately provoke the state. That he died for his convictions adds an unforgettable dimension to them.

On such an interpretation of Easter, Jesus would be exemplary as an ethicist and truthteller who understood that commitments involve risks. His example would not be one of seeking death, or seeking meaning in death. The instruction would be to accept that some risk of death follows, in certain circumstances, from commitments to values such as love and truth.

“Love and truth.” Once, after a debate in 2009 in Bratislava, I looked over at the notes that the Czech thinker (and by then former president) Václav Havel had been keeping for himself. He had written "love and truth" on a sheet of paper, and then doodled flowers around it.

Havel was the author of a famous secular east European statement about risk in politics. He wrote "Power of the Powerless" in communist Czechoslovakia, three decades before that debate, under the shadow of the death of the philosopher Jan Patocka, who had died after police interrogation. In that essay, Havel maintained that one takes risks for one's own truths, not because punishment brings some meaning, but because risk inheres in truth. To "live in truth" means accepting a measure of existential danger.

The Soviet Ukrainian dissident Myroslav Marynovych, who admired Havel, said something similar. The risks that he and others took as human rights activists in the Soviet Ukraine of the 1970s were not a deliberate provocation of the state. They were just an inseparable element of what Myronovych called a "normal Ukrainian life." In the Soviet Union, one could be punished for singing Ukrainian songs or speaking of Ukrainian history. One should do such normal things not to court punishment, but rather because not doing so would compromise the self.

Both Havel (who was secular) and Marynovych (who experienced an epiphany under interrogation) were part of an international human rights movement that saw its main activity as the chronicle. A prominent form of resistance to communism was the attempt to record arrests, trials, deportations, sentences, and abuses. "Human rights" meant telling the truth about a moment when a life was interrupted. This tradition was continued after the end of the Soviet Union by investigative reporters who took risks to write about post-communist oligarchy and war.

I was reminded of that truthtelling tradition this Easter week when I read Nataliya Gumenyuk's reporting from Ukrainian territories from which Russian troops have withdrawn. Gumenyuk is one of an admirable group of Ukrainian reporters who have taken their share of risks reporting the inequality and conflict of the twenty-first century. (Russian reporters, such as those working for Novaya Gazeta and Ekho Moskvy belong to this tradition as well. These media have been forced to shut down by the Russian government.)

During the war in Ukraine, Russian occupation practice has been to execute Ukrainian local elites. Russian soldiers shoot Ukrainian civilians in the head for having taken some responsibility for local affairs. In the telling of survivors, these local elites were not seeking some heroic end. They simply could not bring themselves to collaborate with a Russian occupation regime. "They were killed for us," says a Ukrainian survivor to Gumenyuk, in an article published on western-rite Good Friday. What is meant is that they died because of how they lived, as servants of their communities. The point, though, was not that their death was redemptive. The murder was a horror.

I also hear something of an older east European tradition in the way that Volodymyr Zelens'kyi addresses Ukrainian losses. In an interview also published on Good Friday, Zelens'kyi speaks of suffering and death involved in resistance to invasion as a result of a risk that had to be taken to preserve the life of a society. Zelens'kyi does not glamorize combat or death. He gave a speech the other day which recalled Havel: he defined living in a lie as the source of Putin's aggression, and spoke of truth as a form of courage.

That is one broad way of thinking about politics suggested by Easter: the values of life are affirmed by a risk of death. Life is full of values, but attached to each one is risk. The risk is attendant upon the value. If the risk is realized in death, the value is affirmed. But death is not the point.

In a rival interpretation of the death of Jesus, to which Christians are vulnerable, death is the point. It is the suffering and the dying, rather that the acting and the living, that creates the meaning.

In such thinking about Easter, the significance of the dying can crowd out the living message of love and truth. The Polish Romanticism of the nineteenth century veered in this direction. The vision of Poland as a "Christ of Nations" was less about Christian comportment and more about the willingness to die for a cause. A century later, Romanian fascists identified strongly with Christianity (Eastern Orthodoxy), and had an exuberant cult of death and martyrdom.

A certain kind of focus on the death of Jesus has a way, in politics at least, of dissolving responsibility for action. One convenient interpretation of Jesus dying for our sins is that we are innocent. And then the question arises as to who "we" are. Those within our group can be seen as free of sin, regardless of what we do, whereas the others can be seen as sinners, regardless of what they do.

The Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin, a Christian (Orthodox) fascist, advanced such a doctrine of national innocence. Ilyin's view was that Christ's teachings about truth and love were to be understood in a particular way, with respect to a particular nation. The world was broken, and could only be healed by Russians, and in particular by a fascist Russian leader. That was the truth that mattered. Only Russia had the chance to become a Christian nation, and that was by way of a totalitarianism that eliminated the differences between people and ruler. A restored Russia that could lead humanity would be without national minorities and without Ukraine, which Ilyin claimed did not exist. Christ commanded the love of God and the love of neighbor, but this meant for Ilyin the hatred of the Godless, which is to say those who did not understand Russia’s destiny.

On Ilyin's view, anything a Russian leader did to create a fascist, imperial Russia was by definition innocent of sin, since it was a step towards the redemption of the entire world. There is nothing wrong with lying and killing in a flawed world. Indeed, lying and killing are good when done by a Russian leader on a crusade to restore wholeness to the world.

The last time Russia invaded Ukraine, in 2014, Putin was in the habit of citing Ilyin to legitimate Russian empire. And to justify that war, a living Russian fascist, Alexander Dugin, supplied the image of Russia as a crucified boy (in “news” about an event that never took place).

Putin’s rhetoric about this war make sense within such a framework. In a rally, Putin quoted the Bible to celebrate the death of Russians in battle. He said that their death had made the nation more unified than ever before...

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Exterminate God?

That seems to be the objective.

See, at Pajamas, "New York Times Takes a Swing at God, Misses Wildly.

The essay of ire is, Shalom Auslander, at the New York Times' opinion pages, "In This Time of War, I Propose We Give Up God."

Charles Murray, Human Diversity

At Amazon, Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class.

Melissa Stark Hired to Replace Michele Tafoya on NBC's Sunday Night Football

I remember Ms. Melissa from back in the day, when she did sideline reporting for Monday Night Football on ABC, from 2000-2003.

An absolutely lovely and awesome replacement for her predecessor, (conservative) Michele Tafoya, who's now gone into politics.

At the New York Post, "Melissa Stark hired to replace Michele Tafoya in ‘Sunday Night Football’ surprise."

How Feminism Got Hijacked

From Zoe Strimpel, at Bari Weiss's Common Sense, "The movement that once declared 'I am woman, hear me roar' can no longer define what a woman is. What happened?":

“Pregnant people at much higher risk of breakthrough Covid,” The Washington Post recently declared. This was in keeping with the newspaper’s official new language policy: “If we say pregnant women, we exclude those who are transgender and nonbinary.”

“I’m not a biologist,” Ketanji Brown Jackson, the next Supreme Court justice and a formerly pregnant person herself, told her Senate inquisitors while trying to explain why she couldn’t define “woman.”

“It’s a very contested space at the moment,” explained Australian Health Secretary Brendan Murphy—a nephrologist, a doctor of medicine—when he was asked the same question at a hearing in Melbourne. “We’re happy to provide our working definition.”

The meaning of “woman,” the Labor Party’s Anneliese Dodds, in Britain, observed, “depended on context.” (Never mind that Dodds oversees the party’s women’s agenda.)

“I think people get themselves down rabbit holes on this one,” Labor’s Yvette Cooper added the next day, March 8, International Women’s Day. She declined to follow suit.

What were normal people—those who did not have any trouble defining woman, those who found talk of “pregnant people” and “contested spaces” and “rabbit holes” baffling—to make of this obvious discomfort with “women”? Jackson, Dodds and Cooper—and, no doubt, every individual formerly or currently capable of becoming pregnant on the masthead at The Washington Post—would call themselves feminists. Champions of women’s rights. (So, too, one imagines, would Dr. Murphy.) Once upon a time, it was women like them who proudly declared, I am woman, hear me roar. It was women like them who stood up for women and womanhood.

But now these exemplars of female empowerment—educated, sophisticated, wielding enormous influence—seemed to have forgotten what “woman” meant. Or whether it was okay to say “woman.” Or whether “woman” was a dirty word.

It wasn’t simply about language. It was about how we think about and treat women. For nearly 2,500 years—from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” to Seneca Falls to Anita Hill to #MeToo—women had been fighting, clawing their way out of an ancient, deeply repressive, often violent misogyny. But now that they were finally on the cusp of the Promised Land, they were turning their backs on all that progress. They were erasing themselves.

How we got from there to here is the story of an unbelievable hijacking. Two, actually.

It was only five decades ago, in the 1970s, that women—mostly white, middle-class and from places like New York, Boston and north London, and fed up with being sidelined by their comrades on the left—forged a new movement. They called it Women’s Liberation.

At the start, Women’s Liberation was seen as the domain of women with money—like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and, in the United Kingdom, Germaine Greer and Rosie Boycott. But soon it became the movement of everyday mothers, daughters, wives, working women, poor women, and women regularly beaten up by their boyfriends and husbands.

They embodied a politics of action: protesting, writing, lobbying, setting up shelters. They formed sprawling, nationwide organizations like the National Organization of Women, the National Abortion Campaign and the National Coalition Against Sexual Assault.

And at the center of their politics was an awareness of their physicality, a keen understanding that the challenges women faced were bound up with the bodies they had been born into. Exploitation at home and at work, the threat of sexual violence, unequal pay—all that was a function of their sex. Nothing better summed up the ethos of Women’s Liberation than “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” which was published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Every feminist had a copy or had read one. It sold something like four million copies. It was a bible. That’s because “Our Bodies, Ourselves” rejected the old, Puritan discomforts with female sexuality that, feminists argued, had prevented women from realizing themselves, and empowered women by educating them about their own bodies.

By the 1980s, women had won several key victories. Equal pay was the law (if not always the reality). No-fault divorce was widespread. Abortion was safe and legal. Women were now going to college, getting mortgages, playing competitive sports and having casual sex. In the United States, they were running for president, and they were getting elected to the House and Senate in record numbers. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister.

In the wake of all these breakthroughs, the movement began to lose steam. It contracted, then it splintered, and a vacuum opened up. Academics took over—hijacked—the cause. There was an obvious irony: It was women’s liberationists who had successfully made women a topic worthy of academic scholarship. But now that the feminist professoriat had the luxury of not worrying about the very concrete issues the older feminists had fought for, feminist professors spent their days reflecting on their feminism—exploring, reimagining and rejecting old orthodoxies.

“As soon as the academics got hold of feminism, they ruined it,” said Kathleen Stock, a feminist philosophy professor formerly of the University of Sussex and the author of “Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.” “It should be and is a grassroots movement about women and their interests. Academics just took it away from them.”

It wasn’t just that these academics took it upon themselves to develop fiendishly complex theories about women, dressed up in a fiendishly complex language. It was that this hyper-intellectualized feminism, by embracing this hyper-intellectualized language, excluded most women. It transformed feminism from activism to theory, from the concrete to the abstract, from a movement that sought to liberate women from the discriminations imposed on them by their sex to a school of thought that was less interested in sex than gender...

Still more.